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For a Change, Texans in Houston Dress the Part

The Mission Trail Riders arrived in Houston on Friday for the rodeo.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

HOUSTON — A funny thing happened here on Friday. Texas came to town.

Cowboys and cowgirls were everywhere — on the sidewalks and in the playgrounds, in the downtown skyscrapers and the restaurants — and they were not even tourists. They actually lived here.

For decades, this city has celebrated, as it did on Friday, a tradition called Go Texan Day, the one day of the year on which people in Houston dress the way people outside Houston think people in Houston dress. On the Friday before the annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo gets under way, tens of thousands of Houstonians head to their schools and offices in newly purchased cowboy hats, cowboy boots and jeans. They dress, in other words, as if they’re from Texas, which they are, though it is easy to forget that simple fact in the state’s biggest city.

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Customers lined up at Cavender's Boot City on Friday to buy the appropriate attire — cowboy boots, hats and bandannas — for Go Texan Day.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Houston is as cosmopolitan and traffic-snarled as Los Angeles and as diverse as Queens, with parts as wealthy as the Upper East Side. It is the fourth-largest city in the country, with a world-class symphony orchestra and opera. Its voters in 2009 made Houston the largest city in the United States to elect an openly gay mayor, Annise D. Parker, a Democrat who has since been re-elected. You can go days without seeing anyone in a cowboy hat, but not a minute without seeing a BMW or a Starbucks. As Don B. Graham, a former president of the Texas Institute of Letters and a longtime observer of Texas culture, put it in a recent essay, “Here’s a rule of thumb: Any time you read a novel set in Houston and there are tumbleweeds tumbling through the city, you know you’re in faux Texasville.”

The dress-up tradition, which began in the 1950s as a way to promote the rodeo, has become a kind of unofficial holiday. Mayor Parker wore jeans, a fringed jacket, a cowboy hat and boots, as did others on her staff. On the Rice University campus, someone put a big blue cowboy hat atop the bronze statue of the founder, William Marsh Rice. The city’s public schools, as well as private Catholic, Jewish and Greek Orthodox schools, were populated with belt-buckled students wearing vests, denim skirts and sheriff’s badges.

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Rory Stebner, a hat-shaper at Cavender's, said, “It's kind of like an extra Halloween.”Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

“It’s kind of like an extra Halloween,” said Rory Stebner, 47, who like others his age remembered celebrating Go Texan Day when he was a child. “I grew up in Houston, but my parents came from the country, so I’ve worn boots and jeans my entire life. Go Texan Day just meant I got to wear my regular clothes to school, instead of school clothes.”

The day is popular in the schools, but even more popular in the city’s Western wear shops.

On the eve of Go Texan Day on Thursday night, a line of cars jammed the street leading to Cavender’s Boot City near Reliant Park, the stadium complex hosting the livestock show and rodeo, which starts on Tuesday and last year had a general attendance of 2.26 million. Managers at Cavender’s reinforced their staff with temporary employees, stayed open past the usual 9 p.m. closing time and hired off-duty police officers to maintain order in the parking lot. At 9:07 p.m., about 35 last-minute shoppers stood in the cashier line holding cowboy hats and red bandannas, while dozens of others swarmed around them.

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A professional clown entertained the customers at Cavender's.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

“This is our largest business day of the year,” said Mike Cavender, 54, whose father opened the first Cavender’s in 1965 and who is a vice president of the company. “Bigger than Christmas.”

On Friday afternoon, the place was still packed. A man in a bow tie browsed among the leather belts while talking on his cellphone, as Mr. Stebner, a hat-shaper at Cavender’s, worked a steam machine. Nearby, Frank Adu, 41, a car salesman in a pinstripe suit who is originally from Ghana in West Africa, looked for cowboy boots.

“Today is Go Texan Day,” Mr. Adu said. “This morning I dressed up my three kids with their boots and everything and sent them to school.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 25, 2012, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: For a Change, a City’s Texans Dress the Part. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe